


say my name

by clarkeneedsbellamy



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Amnesia, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-06
Updated: 2014-07-07
Packaged: 2018-02-07 19:20:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1910730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clarkeneedsbellamy/pseuds/clarkeneedsbellamy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’m not him.”  The words come out of Bellamy’s mouth, clad in Bellamy’s voice, and Clarke never doubts them for a moment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	say my name

He stares right through her sometimes.  Clarke doesn’t hold it against him. His eyes have taken to skirting straight past Octavia too, more often than not. 

If the realization that he doesn’t remember her cuts like a knife, the abrupt comprehension that he doesn’t recognize his sister either strikes clean through her skull.  Not so unlike his own head wound.

She could take him forgetting her.  Clarke has lost people before – too many, too young patients.  Wells.  Her father.  She could grit her teeth and force her way through Bellamy forgetting every argument they’ve ever had, every silent conversation they’ve every shared, the times he spat ‘princess’ at her, and the times he murmured it against her lips. The first time she’d told him that she needed him, and the last time he’d said that he loved her.

Clarke could bear that like she could bear losing a layer of skin – with great difficulty and horrible scarring. 

But the first time he opens his eyes after the attack, blood still staining the ground around his head in a grotesque halo, his gaze darts from face to face in blind panic.  Even Octavia’s.

Amnesia is so far outside her range of expertise that Clarke hardly knows where to start with treatments.  Octavia had been her strongest card.  Even now, she feels as though Bellamy should find something familiar in her face (if only himself); that he should itch at the feeling that he knows her.

But such intuition remains dormant, draped along with the rest of his memories in darkness. 

* * *

“You built this.”

Bellamy traces a hand against the surface of the wall, eyebrows darting with the motion.  “Not bad work.”

He touches it like it’s strange, like it belongs to someone else, like he touches everything in camp.

Clarke cinches a smile.  Gland by gland, her skin chars and crumbles.

* * *

Octavia spends hours repainting her entire childhood for him through tumbling words, stuttered breaths, and desperate glances. When that fails, she tries yelling, pleading, and glaring.

She and Lincoln spend several nights away from camp after that.  Bellamy stays silent where he should seethe, shrugs where he should rage.

“I cared about her,” he finally says one day to Clarke, gaze drawing a question mark onto Octavia’s hunched form.

_You always did what you had to do to protect your sister._ That’s  _who you are._

“Yeah,” she murmurs, wondering who he is now.  “You did.”

* * *

“Do you even want to remember?”

Clarke checks the bandages still holding tight against his temple, words as soft as her fingertips.  The last time she’d truly feared Bellamy, she’d been dangling over a pit of spikes, he’d had one hand clenched around hers, and he’d clearly hesitated before pulling her back to the ground.

Hoisted onto his elbows, he studies the worn ceiling of his tent.  “What do you want me to say?”  Fear clamps her teeth down hard against her tongue.  “Yes. Of course I want to remember getting my mother killed and my sister locked up.  Sounds like a blast.  And why wouldn’t I want to remember killing three hundred people.  Tell me, what is it about my life that I should want back, because I’d love to hear.”

Tooth by tooth, she excavates her tongue. “You did good things here.  You inspired people, you helped people, you saved people, you—”

“Loved you?”

He might as well have said  _helped you cross the street once_ for all the bland interest in his voice.  Straightening his bandage, Clarke jerks her hand to her side and her legs up from the ground.  “You’re good.  Just be careful not to touch it too much.  Or move it too much, or…”

Clarke doesn’t realize that she’s still talking until she’s lurching out of his tent and heaving each syllable against the fresh air.

* * *

“I’m not him.”

The words come out of Bellamy’s mouth, clad in Bellamy’s voice, and Clarke never doubts them for a moment. “I know.” Still, she doesn’t falter.  She doesn’t make one move to gather her clothes from the ground and stretch them back onto her body.

“If this is some way to make me remember you, remember  _loving_ you—”

“It’s not.”

Clarke stops a foot away from him, palms flat against her bare skin for fear of trembling.  She’s never been a particularly skilled liar – not with the people who know her well.  Her father only laughed when she once tried to claim sobriety through beer-soaked slurs, her mother had never once believed her childhood attempts to fake sick, and Wells had eventually learned to simply roll his eyes whenever she tried to practice on him. 

Breath slinks like syrup down her throat as Bellamy stares at her. She feels it like a slap when he breaks eye contact to rake a glance from the pale curve of her chest.  Cautious words follow, each one as careful of traps as his steps had once been.  “Why.  What’s in this for you? Not that I’m complaining, believe me, but—”

_Because I want you to know that I’m lying, because I want you_ back. 

But neither of those responses seems particularly practical, so Clarke wrenches her fingers around his neck and her mouth against his instead. “Because,” she enunciates against his lips, “I want you to take off your damn shirt.”

It’s the first time since the accident that she can remember seeing a slow grin spread across his face.  “That I can do.”  Before her mouth can fully register the loss of his tongue, he’s yanked the sweat-stained fabric of his shirt over his head and crushed her against him once more.  Everything about him is hard and warm and familiar – enough so to leave a scream climbing her throat.

She settles for clawing crescent trenches into his shoulder blades. 

_I miss you._

Freeing her mouth, he trails his lips from the curve of her jaw to the slope of her throat to the hard line of her collarbone. His mouth sucks and nips at her skin until she’s half convinced it’s burning.

_I need you._

His hands grapple at her thighs, hoisting her legs off the ground and tight around the rocking of his hips.

_Say my name.  Just once, say my name._

They crumble against the ground.  Her fingers pull at his zipper.  His breath shudders against her shoulder.

_Bellamy.  Bellamy.  Bellamy_

(He never says her name, so, again and again, she swallows his.)

* * *

“That help?”

It takes exactly two minutes of post-coital tension for Clarke to raise herself from the ground, grope for her clothes, and wriggle her way back into her panties.  She shrugs against the worn straps of her bra. Even with a wounded hippocampus and possible frontal lobe damage, he can make her toes curl and he knows it.  Or his body can, at the least.  But, then, she’s not certain he cares for the technicalities. 

“No.”  She wants to cry, so she flashes him a tight smile instead.  “You?”

Clarke opts to stumble from his tent with her shirt still hiked around her shoulders rather than hear him say  _no_ in turn.

 


End file.
